Half MD talks about his internal medicine rotation:
One of the frequent complaints about the internal medicine clerkship is that rounds take entirely too long. My own team would routinely spend about three hours going through a census of only 20 patients. Some of my classmates got thrown into groups which would take five hours every day to run through the list””and that’s after all of the pre-rounding has been completed, orders filed, test results analyzed, and patients reassured.
Of course, the time it takes for rounds would be dependent on how efficient the attending or resident was. Three to five hours for 20 patients sounds about right. At least it was for me 7 years ago when I was a resident.
I wonder if there is more urgency to rounding now, with the pressure that hospitals put on attendings to quickly turnover and discharge patients.
